I went with a friend to a Rich Dad seminar about 4-5 years ago. We were in Hustle mode and this is before we knew about IM, so we were down to hear what they had to say. We were also pretty naive at the time.
We get there, and it was one of the MOST FUCKED UP experiences of my life. Everyone there was 40 year old married couples that were willingly buying into everything the speaker was saying. He was getting people shouting and cheering and begging for the exclusive Spiral Notebooks of information he was giving away.
No one was allowed to network or talk with each other. They wanted everyone to obediently sit and listen to seminar. My friend and I looked at each other at about 8 minutes in and were like "What the fuck is this shit?!"
I'll give props to the speaker. He was manipulative as hell and had the audience in the palm of his hands. But I could sense that it was draining to him to lie about promises to their face when they came up and talked to him after the speech. He mentioned that he was gonna stop doing the seminars at the end of the year.
Anyways, the speech was all about promoting a signup for the next part of the pyramid, which was to pay $197 for like 2 books and a ticket to the next seminar. They also kept pimping the idea to call all your credit card companies to increase your spending limit so you could "invest in buying cheap houses and flipping them in less than a month" (which translated to raise your credit limit so you can pay the maximum amount possible for these next seminars).
I talked to a sales representative after and he was trying to sell me as hard as he could. I was like, look I'm not buying this shit, but it's impressive you got this many people to sign up. He tried every angle. He even used, "You can buy this and make over $15,000 a month like I am, or you can go back home sit on your ass and play video games all day." lol. He was sleezy as shit.
I go home to read more about it and find that some people have posted about how this scheme has put them more than $20,000 in debt. And that was only from purchasing SEMINAR material. Some dropped over $100,000 into buying seminars and investing in buying houses that were a shitty deal. Like how the FUCK do you think spending $20,000 seminars is a good idea? The only person I didn't feel bad for was the smug 40 year old guy in the front row wearing a fake Rolex and bragging about how he read books like "The Richest Man in Babylon" twice a year and was 'very successful.' This guys in the crowd were some of the strangest and most naive characters I've ever seen.
While it was a huge waste of an hour and a half, it was an amazing eye opener to just how big of sheep the general public can be. Not sure Kiyosaki is the one to point the finger at for this shit, or if he just sold his name out to an MLM company. Either way, it was sleezy as hell and mainly just pissed me the fuck off.
